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The Coach was an old man, and like many old men, especially powerful ones, he couldn’t imagine the world he had built going on without him.

He wanted, it seemed, to coach forever.

His great fear was that he would end up like one of his idols, Bear Bryant, who had died in 1983 only weeks after retiring from the University of Alabama. He was determined to prevent this from happening to him.

But what happened to the Coach was much worse. He left the game he loved not on his own terms, as he had demanded days earlier, but on terms dictated by Penn State’s Board of Trustees—that is, he was fired. He was not under indictment, like the school’s athletic director, but he was enveloped in shame. He had fought hard, first to hold on to his power, then to at least fashion his own ending. But he had lost.

He surfaced one final time, summoning a journalist, the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins, to his home for an interview. The choice was deliberate. In the days after the scandal, she had been one of few high-profile columnists not to heap blame on him. Yet there was perhaps another reason, too: She was a link back to a different time, before his image had been complicated by history. Her father, Dan Jenkins, had been one of the first national sportswriters to make the pilgrimage to State College to see him, producing a charming Sports Illustrated portrait in 1968 of a dreamy, intellectual, unconventional but highly effective coach that helped launch a genre and build a mythology.

There he sat, in a wheelchair in his kitchen with Jenkins’s daughter—as well as his lawyer and a minder from his public relations firm. Where he had once commanded practice fields and stadium sidelines, press conferences and lecture halls, and even a Super Dome (he had spoken rousingly on behalf of a presidential candidate), he was now trying to persuade a skeptical public that he had done the right thing, or at least not done the wrong thing. It was meant to be the beginning of his rehabilitation, but as it turned out, it was our last glimpse of him: the Coach wearing a wig and sipping Pepsi over crushed ice, his needling, nasal Brooklyn squawk reduced to a whisper.

***

For more than forty-five years, that coach, Joe Paterno, had ruled State College, Pennsylvania, a college town tucked into a valley of meadows and farms bounded by thickly forested hills where mountain lions once roamed. It’s in the geographic center of Pennsylvania, “equally inaccessible from all parts of the state,” as one of the university’s early presidents, Edwin Sparks, once joked.

During the 1930s, when State College’s fertile terrain and remote location protected it from the worst ravages of the Great Depression, it became known as “Happy Valley.” The nickname fell out of use for many decades but was revived in the 1970s, when Penn State’s rising football program—motto: “Success with Honor”—first started throwing off the mythic glow that would bathe this quaint college town for years to come, until it was abruptly extinguished by last fall’s child sex-abuse scandal.

As you exit the interstate and drive toward the Penn State campus on University Drive, the first thing you see is the home of the Nittany Lions—depending on your perspective, the massive, battleship-gray structure either enhancing or disrupting this pastoral landscape.

Beaver Stadium was built in 1909, then dismantled, moved across campus, and reassembled, erector-set-style in 1960, a decade after Joe Paterno arrived at Penn State as an assistant and six years before he was elevated to head coach. Great pains were taken to retain much of the original stadium, Beaver Field, which survived inside a new steel structure. This was done more for financial reasons than sentimental ones: The savings, according to a university press release, were on the order of $300,000.

Its 46,000 seats made Beaver Stadium America’s largest all-steel collegiate football stadium. Paterno was convinced they’d never fill it. “You will be marked as the guy who ruined Penn State football,” he told his boss, Charles “Rip” Engel. Beaver Stadium has since been expanded six times—most recently at a cost of nearly $100 million—bringing its total capacity to 108,000 and progressively obscuring the view of the cluster of hills that form the valley’s picturesque backdrop, including the tallest of the peaks, Mount Nittany.

When I visited Penn State in early December, the dozens of news crews that had flooded into State College to cover the scandal had disappeared. The makeshift shrine on Paterno’s lawn was gone, too, along with the Porta-Potty provided by the town for the reporters and photographers who’d been stationed outside around the clock. Eight hundred forty McKee Street, the home that Paterno and his wife had purchased in 1968 for $58,000, was once again just a nondescript ranch house, tastefully adorned with Christmas lights and indistinguishable from the rest of the modest homes lining this quiet block. Paterno himself had gone underground with lung cancer, the ailing, deposed ruler retreating into his bunker while his critics and loyalists fought over what he had and hadn’t done, and over how he should be remembered.

For its part, Penn State’s administration intended to open a new, post-Paterno chapter in the school’s history. Campus stores would not be restocking their shelves after selling out existing merchandise bearing the Coach’s likeness. The university’s new president, Rodney Erickson, hosted the first “town hall” meeting in the school’s 156-year history, opening the proceedings by announcing that it was time to “move forward.” It was not clear, though, that Penn State’s students were ready to move forward, or really that they had even begun to wrestle with the questions that seemed to be at the crux of the scandal, at least as it concerned their legendary coach: Had Paterno not really grasped the severity of what had taken place in his team’s showers? Had the graduate assistant who told him what he’d witnessed been too uncomfortable to describe the scene in all its horrifying detail? Or was Paterno not the man he claimed to be? Had he been corrupted by his power? Did he put the reputation of his football program over the welfare of a ten-year-old child?

One morning in State College not long after Paterno had been dismissed, I sat in on an undergraduate course called Joe Paterno, Communications, and the Media—better known simply as “JoePa Class.” The course is taught by Mike Poorman, a Penn State alumnus who also serves as the faculty adviser to “Paternoville,” the tent city outside Beaver Stadium populated by hundreds of students who camp out for days to make sure they’re among the first to pass through Gate A when it opens. On the day I attended, Poorman was lecturing about what he considered to be Paterno’s seven most important speeches. Toward the end of the period, he zeroed in on one passage in particular, drawn from Paterno’s 1973 commencement address at Penn State: “Now if each of us is easily seduced by expedience, by selfishness, by ambition regardless of any cost to our principles, then the spectacle we see in Watergate will surely mark the end of this grand experiment in democracy. … So I warn you: Don’t underestimate the world. It can corrupt quickly and it can corrupt completely.”

Poorman paused briefly before asking his students what they thought of this statement in light of recent events. Were there any connections to be drawn? When no one replied, he offered a hint: “These are Joe’s core values he’s talking about: individual responsibility.”

More silence followed. “Am I leading you to water and you don’t want to drink?” Poorman asked.

Buy Jonathan Mahler's "Death Comes to Happy Valley" for $1.99.